THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
When Caroline Puts Down the Bowl
Caroline can tell her rescuer when she has had enough porridge. Telling him that she has no wish to marry is a rather different undertaking. The distance between those two conversations gives this werewolf romance its sharpest scene.
THE SHORT TAKE
Caroline is most persuasive when she interrupts somebody else’s account of what she wants. The opening gives her several such moments. It also makes us wait, sometimes impatiently, while powerful men interpret her grief for her.
An introduction she cannot finish
Caroline arrives at the pack house carrying a doctor’s report. She knows she is four weeks pregnant. Victor does not know, Princess Nina does not know, and the little interval in which Caroline might have told them is all the more affecting because she has been rehearsing such good news. Nina asks who she is. Victor supplies the answer before Caroline can finish introducing herself. Three years as his partner have made her, for the purposes of this room, an old friend.
The backyard scene gives this ordinary social cruelty a supernatural mechanism. Victor can command the answer to his rejection and Caroline hears herself comply. Yet he leaves without learning what was on the paper. She has made a decision about what it would be dangerous to tell him. An unfortunate lapse interrupts the scene at its most formal point. The oath changes Victor’s surname and the name of his pack. With so much riding on the precise words that sever the bond, the slip sent me back through the opening to check who was speaking.
Read chapter 1 · Return to Caroline’s arrival at the pack house ↗Where she was trying to go
Back at home, Caroline sees the broken pots on the porch. She had tended those flowers herself. That brief recognition gives this house a life before the discovery inside it. Her mother stops her from calling the hospital and tells her to run. During the pursuit Caroline thinks of getting to the sentinels. She already has an idea of whom to tell and what she wants them to do, well before a royal stranger finds her at the border.
The chase piles injury on injury until it became difficult for me to picture the route through the trees. One piece of sound carries through with unusual clarity. The pursuers name the people they fear answering to if she survives. Caroline can later tell somebody exactly what she heard. She never witnesses the order being given, and the distance between those two things will matter when other wolves begin circulating a different account of the attack.
Read chapter 2 · Follow Caroline’s attempt to reach the sentinels ↗The investigation outside the door
When Caroline wakes, Prince Andrew is holding another report. She has to ask more than once for news about the pregnancy. The doctor delivers it while his staff also watch the prince, astonished by the care he shows her. This is a painful division of attention. A woman has just learned that she has lost a child, and for stretches of the scene the extraordinary development the witnesses register is a change in a man’s bedside manner.
It helps that Andrew’s own people have things to say about his response. When he orders punishment for the whole pack, Miller objects and asks him to identify the person responsible. Jeremy’s first enquiries in the territory turn up an account involving debt and rogues. Miller suspects a planted story. For a few pages the investigation has a real difficulty. The prince’s impatience can put men in motion very quickly, but it gives his investigator little room to bring him an answer he dislikes.
Read chapter 4 · Hear Miller question the prince’s first order ↗Whose child she remembers
Caroline offers to pay her medical costs once she can work again. Andrew ignores the offer and asks for her former mate’s name. She supplies it and he immediately makes a phone call. The whole exchange is disconcertingly efficient. Neither of them has had to say what she might owe the man who has taken charge of her treatment and her case.
Later Andrew asks why she wanted a child fathered by Victor. Caroline reminds him that it was her child too. For me this is the strongest answer she gives in the opening. She had been happy, by herself, when the doctor told her. The reader was there. Andrew was not. The book does something generous when it lets her recover that morning as she experienced it, even if his proposal comes so quickly afterwards that she has very little time to dwell on the memory.
Read chapter 7 · Listen to Caroline describe hearing the news ↗The limit of a small kindness
At the bedside Andrew feeds her porridge. Caroline says she is full and pushes the bowl away. He puts it back on the tray. It is an undramatic piece of care, and it sets up a much harder question a few paragraphs later. He talks about their wedding as a future event. She tells him marriage is far from her thoughts and that she cannot feel the bond he describes. He listens, smiles and leaves. Out in the corridor he is still quite sure of his appeal.
Alone again, Caroline begins to consider what his position might let her do about Victor. I wanted more of this private reckoning. She has a practical reason to take the offer seriously, a good memory of what it costs to trust an Alpha, and the right to be unsure how much comfort she took from his visit. At the close of chapter eight she has made up her mind to gain power. Andrew still has to hear what she will do with his proposal.
Read chapter 8 · Stay with Caroline after Andrew leaves the room ↗Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. The first eight catalogue entries each contain one complete story chapter. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND
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